


Unbirthdays

by 221b_hound



Series: Unkissed [45]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff and Smut, Gift Giving, Kigurumi, M/M, Sex Toys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-06 17:07:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6762643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Sherlock buy each other random gifts - unbirthday presents, John calls them. These are the two oddest gifts they gave, and what happened with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. John

**Author's Note:**

> This time, John's oddest gift from Sherlock.  
> Next time, Sherlock's oddest gift from John.
> 
> All the fluffy Un feels, to make up for the melancholy of the last one.

The first time John bought a random gift for Sherlock – a T-shirt bearing symbols for the elements oxygen and magnesium, spelling out OMg – Sherlock was puzzled.

“It’s not my birthday.”

“Consider it an unbirthday present then,” said John, with the kind of lopsided smile that meant he didn’t think Sherlock would know what that meant. But Sherlock knew; he had read _Alice in Wonderland_. Actually, when he was little, his father had read it to him, in between pirate books. At five years old, he’d enjoyed debating Wonderland’s peculiar logic, until Daddy won by cheating, which was, blowing raspberries on Sherlock’s little belly and making him squeal with laughter.

Belly-raspberry-blowing duties belonged solely to John these days, and despite his best efforts, Sherlock was still prone to a bit of a squeal as he laughed and wriggled away. John, damn him, remained immune to raspberry-blown tickles on the belly, though he was happy for Sherlock to try.

That was all by the by. What was important was that the OMg T-shirt began the custom of random gifts, unbirthday presents, ranging from the small and cheap (Polish beer, for which John had an unfathomable fondness) to the handsome and expensive (John bought the antique magnifying glass for Sherlock because it was both beautiful and functional. Sherlock used it to inspect, minutely, every bristle on John’s jaw, while John lay in relaxed contentment on the bed while his honeybee catalogued the ginger hairs: “Don’t mention the grey ones!”; “But I love the grey ones too, John”.)

The oddest unbirthday gift Sherlock ever bought for John was the fleshlight, some time after their second anniversary. They’d stumbled across a selection of them at a suspect’s apartment (maintained for assignations) and Sherlock had noted the curiosity in John’s expression.

It was the ‘stealth’ design of fleshlight, with a simple slot instead of a faux body part at the rubbery end. John took it out of the box and gazed at it, lips pursed, blue eyes contemplative.

“Given that we do not engage in penetrative sex,” Sherlock said, feeling a need to explain, “I thought you might enjoy an enveloping toy for when you masturbate.”

John nodded, smiled, kissed his husband and said, “Thank you, sweetheart.” He put the sex toy in the drawer of the bedside table next to the upstairs bed.

To Sherlock’s almost certain knowledge, John had tried it once and then put it away in the drawer.

After a month of trying to determine why the toy had not been a success without having to ask, Sherlock’s curiosity finally won out.

“You don’t like the fleshlight,” he said.

John, reading the paper at the time, looked up. “What? Oh. NO, it’s fine.”

‘You used it only once.”

“Twice,” said John.

“You didn’t like it.”

“It was fine,” John said again.

“I thought you would enjoy penetrative sex of some kind.”

John blinked owlishly at him. He disappeared behind his paper. He pretended to read, then cleared his throat, folded up the paper and looked back at Sherlock, who had never ceased to watch him.

“It was a bit intense,” offered John after a moment, “And afterwards I felt a bit…” he pulled a face, seeking the right words. “I think… ‘lonely’ is the word.”

Sherlock’s eyebrows rose.

“Obviously, it’s not that I need to have you with me for orgasms,” said John – these frank conversations were nothing new to them. “I think it was that… do you remember the conversation we had in the early days, that Christmas when you said you didn’t understand why I seemed content with less sex then you thought I’d probably want.”

“Yes.”

“I told you… I’d done my share of fucking without feeling, or something like that. So. Using the fleshlight made me think of the people I slept with when I thought you were dead. So. The physical sensations were fine. Intense. But it also felt…”

“Mechanical,” said Sherlock thoughtfully.

“Sort of. Usually if I want to wank, it’s my hand and thinking of you, or you’re talking to me while I’m in the shower. Feels more personal. That’s it. This felt impersonal. I appreciate the gift, though. The thought. But it, um. Didn’t really work for me on a… personal level.”

Sherlock considered this. Nodded. John’s sexual behaviours had changed a lot since they had become a couple. Certainly, John did not expect or demand that Sherlock be present for all of his orgasms, but it was also true that Sherlock’s affectionate presence triggered John’s most intense responses.

Sherlock held out his hand to John. John rose, took it, and happily allowed himself to be pulled into an embrace. They kissed. Sherlock bumped his nose against John’s and said in a deep, soft voice, “May I take you to bed, Mr Watson-Holmes?” He held John close and squeezed his bottom, to make sure his intentions were unequivocal.

“Mmmm,” agreed John while kissing him.

Sherlock led him upstairs. He took out the fleshlight and the lube. “I want to try something.”

“All right, honeybee,” John said. Sherlock kissed his husband some more, soft and slow and sensuous kisses over John’s face and throat and chest. Across his shoulders and down his spine as Sherlock helped him to disrobe. Over his bottom and thighs, the arches of his feet and toes.

Then Sherlock, who had done some research before getting the thing in the first place, retrieved John’s sleeping bag, rolled tight in its canvas bag, and used some pillows to help wedge it against the end of the bed. He lubed up the fleshlight and slotted it into the folds of the sleeping bag, fiddling until he was happy with the angle.

John watched him work. “Sweetpea?”

Sherlock stripped down to his pants and laid down with his naked fluffbundle on the mattress. They cuddled and kissed.  John nuzzled Sherlock’s hair and called his sweet boy pretty names, and Sherlock enticed John’s sensitive parts to tingle and pebble and thicken and rise.

“All right?” Sherlock asked.

“Lovely, my bumblebear,” sighed John.

In due course, Sherlock encouraged John to kneel on the bed, facing the bedroll, and he kneeled behind John. He tucked himself up close so that John’s bum rested on Sherlock’s thighs. Sherlock’s hands were wrapped around John’s torso and he tweaked and rubbed John’s nipples; he fondled John’s balls and shaft. He kissed the back of John’s neck.

He took up the lube and slicked up John’s cock and together they manoeuvred John’s cock into the opening of the fleshlight.

“Hands on my thighs,” Sherlock said.

So John sat on Sherlock’s lap, with Sherlock’s knees braced either side of John’s thighs, and John curled his hands over the upper parts of Sherlock’s legs, his head tipped back to rest on Sherlock’s chest.

“I love you,” murmured Sherlock, and he kissed John’s neck and shoulder, he brushed his cheek against John’s. He held John steady against him with one arm across John’s torso, the other reaching between John’s legs to brush fingers over John’s balls.

Then Sherlock pushed forward with his hips, and John, in his lap, moved with the motion, and John’s cock slid deeper into the fleshlight. Sherlock pulled back, John, languid in his arms, pulled back with him and the fleshlight, held firm in the folds of the sleeping bag roll, stayed just where it was.

John exhaled a shuddering breath. “Oh. God. Sweetpea.”

“Mmmm,” said Sherlock, and he pushed their hips forward again.

John’s cock sank into the toy again. He shivered and sighed but didn’t thrust. “Fuck,” he said. “That feels good, honeybee.”

“Hold still,” said Sherlock softly, “Let me.”

And John let him. Sherlock set the pace, using his thighs and hips to control the speed of their movement, and the depth to which John’s cock pushed into the toy and pulled out again. Sherlock kissed John’s neck and back and shoulders and pushed again. Sometimes he played with John’s nipples, sometimes with his balls, sometimes he just held him. He breathed John’s name into John’s ear, and said _I love you_ and said _you’re beautiful_ and said _is it good, John? I want you to feel good._

John said _I love you too, baby_ and _God, you’re lovely_ and _it’s so good, my sweet boy. You make me feel so good._

Sherlock embraced John with his whole body and his voice and his love, and fucked John slow and sweet into the enveloping slickness of the toy, until he sensed the coiling tension in John’s body, and then he fucked John faster and more intensely into the toy, still with all those loving words. Making it personal, making it loving, making it not fucking but making love, in their own way, their different needs met in the same way.

Until John, splayed in Sherlock’s lap and across Sherlock’s chest, Sherlock pushing John’s body to the point of pleasure so intense and John came with  a full-throated cry and the babble, s _weetheart, Sherlock, fuck, god, yes yes, yes, h-h-h-honeybeeeeeee, aaah aaah aaah aaaaaaaaah._

Sherlock carefully drew away, drew John away from so much stimulation, and held John while his trembling body calmed to quiescence. Then he nuzzled John’s neck and slow-toppled them onto the mattress. HE tugged sheets and blankets around while boneless John giggled at how useless he was, and then they were both under covers. Sherlock drew John in for a cuddle and John snuggled in close.

“Happy unbirthday, husband,” said Sherlock, smiling against John’s brow.

John, though post-coitally sleepy, managed a giggle before sighing, contented, and subsiding into a nap.

Sherlock decided he rather liked the sensation of John’s sticky, spent prick pressed against his thigh, with John dozing along his body. He could feel John’s breath on him too, and even sense John’s heartbeat. He catalogued every point where their bodies touched, and the scent of John’s warm body and its residues, and considered once more the uselessness of trying to rate his contentment on any kind of measurable scale, because the parameters kept changing. Sherlock kept exceeding what he’d supposed to be the limits.

And then he began to consider importing that anatomically correct chocolate heart he’d read about as John’s next unbirthday present.


	2. Sherlock

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The oddest unbirthday gift John ever bought for Sherlock was an adult onesie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After chapter one's porn, this is the fluffiest fluff that ever fluffed. Just two men very happy in their lives.

The oddest unbirthday gift John ever bought for Sherlock was an adult onesie.

Like the fleshlight, its purchase was related to a case: a costume party in which 99 people showed up dressed in penguin onesies. The hundredth - the host – wore a fox onesie, and was confused as to how everyone else had shown up in the exact same costume. (The theft of the host’s priceless gold, ebony and diamond tiger statuette was the motivating reason. It took Sherlock to uncover the computer hack, creating the invitation substitution asking each person to come as a penguin, and so cover up the theft with a confusion of suspects.)

Sherlock had wondered at the time what on earth grown adults saw in wearing an all-in-one animal suit. The host had tried to explain about _kigurumi_ and playfulness and comfort. Sherlock remained perplexed.

All of which simply meant that when John spotted the bee onesie hanging off a hook at the Covent Garden markets, he bought it on impulse. It certainly made a change from the special honeys or objects of scientific curiosity that were the usual unbirthday gifts.

John presented the onesie in its plastic bag with a half grin. “In case you want to experiment with the mindset,” he offered.

Sherlock pulled the object out of the bag, held it up by the shoulders, pinched between thumb and forefinger, and frowned at it. He leaned slightly to one side to look past its bright black and yellow stripes towards John, his eyebrows raised as judgementally as he knew how.

John only smirked at him. “Honeybee,” he said, eyes twinkling.

“You are a menace,” said Sherlock darkly.

John waggled his eyebrows, booped Sherlock on the nose and pranced off to put on the kettle.

Before John, Sherlock was the kind of man to take himself very seriously, largely because practically everyone thought the serious things about him were ridiculous and freakish. After John, who thought and said _out loud_ that Sherlock was brilliant and amazing – often for the very things that had previously been a source of mockery – Sherlock began to learn the difference between laughing _at_ and laughing _with_.

And the thing about John was that he was able to tease Sherlock without mocking him. There was so much affection in the teasing, Sherlock found it easier and easier to laugh at himself, too.

With the gift of this ludicrous bee-striped body suit, John’s eyes sparkled with sweet, teasing merriment and no judgement. Sherlock could wear it or not wear it, and that was fine. Its purpose was not to belittle Sherlock or make him feel ridiculed; but it _was_ an invitation to be silly, to be playful and a bit ludicrous himself. If he wanted to; if he was ever so lost to taste and sensibility that he _wore_ the damned thing.

Naturally, that day came about two weeks later.

Sherlock bundled the ridiculous thing into the shelf-side of his wardrobe and ignored it, until that autumn morning.

They had finished a three day case at 2am and fallen into bed. John woke early as usual, and left Sherlock sleeping while he went downstairs for tea and scrambled eggs at Speedy's.

Sherlock woke mid-morning, chilly without John beside him. The day in general was chilly – too chilly for a mere sheet, which Sherlock, who couldn't be bothered to dress, would have preferred. Naked, shivering and grumbling, he reached blindly into the wardrobe for his winter-weight dressing gown, and pulled out instead the bee onesie. He glared at it – at the bright yellow stripes among the black, at the little blue wings on the back of it, and the funny little hood with a smiley face, big black eyes and black antennae, none of which looked anything like an actual bee.

A draft came in under the door and Sherlock, still grumbling, pulled on the onesie and pulled the hood over his messy curls.

His ankles and feet stuck out the bottom and so he dug around to find the second most ridiculous gift John had given him - bee slippers, all gold and black wool, but very soft and warm. He ignored the slipper-bee Googly eyes in favour of getting the kettle on.

Sherlock made tea. He made toast. He noticed his microscope, still set up on the table where he'd abandoned it for the last case. He sat at the table, had his breakfast and examined the hair samples to see if they’d done anything interesting in the intervening days.

They hadn’t, so he ate his toast, sipped tea, switched the slides and made a few notes. Then he wriggled his toes in his cosy bee slippers, unzipped the onesie far enough to flick toast crumbs from his chest, zipped it up again and found the slide of fingernail clippings. That proved to have grown some specks of fungus, which was much more promising.

The hood of the onesie fell over his forehead and created a little shield over the eyepiece of the microscope, which brought out some of the colours of the fungus, so Sherlock adjusted the cloth more deliberately, changed the magnification slightly and jotted down a few more notes.

The door opened. Sherlock ignored that, because it was probably Mrs Hudson or John, though he hadn’t been alerted by their tread on the stairs, which were very distinctive and now he thought about it, that tread has sounded a lot more like…

Sherlock raised his head and looked at the doorway, and at Greg Lestrade standing in it, staring at him with round eyes.

The hood of the bee onesie flopped over Sherlock’s forehead.

Greg Lestrade made a weird kind of choking noise.

Sherlock pushed the hood back and regarded Lestrade with a haughty lift of his chin.

“What do you want? I’m busy,” said Sherlock, with ten times the hauteur of his lifted chin.

To Greg’s credit, although he continued to regard Sherlock with eyes so wide they were practically anime eyes, he only lifted a large envelope and said, “I promised John copies of the photos of you two from that case at the gala, in your suits.”

Sherlock, with great dignity, rose from his chair and took the envelope. Inside were a series of photographs of him and John in their rental tuxes. John had been absolutely enamoured of the official function photographer’s shots of them dancing, and then of them cornering the chap who was definitely not Latvian royalty, and then of Sherlock’s impromptu swordfight. The photographer had been delighted to finally get his SD card back with the pictures of the night, and made up prints for them.

Sherlock handed the envelope back and waved airily towards the coffee table. “Leave them there. John will be back shortly. Or you can take them to him downstairs. I expect he’s breakfasting at Speedy’s.”

“Ah,” said Greg.

But before he could say anything that everyone might later regret, John came through the door, shouldering past Greg as he took off his coat and scarf, and in his matter-of-fact way said, “So did that help with the _kigurumi_ case at all?” He nodded at the bee slippers and added, “I take it you were right about the soles of those things too?”

Sherlock stared down at his bee slippers. “I’m afraid so. They have much more grip that you’d expect, he certainly didn’t slip in them.”

“Who?” asked Greg.

John, having hung his coat and scarf, wheeled around to Greg and took the envelope out of his fingers. “Some guy in Redding had suspicions about his uncle, but Sherlock thinks the man’s paranoid. He certainly seemed a bit unhinged, but I think he was laying it on a bit thick.”

“A troublemaker,” Sherlock agreed with irritation, “And a total waste of my time.”

Greg gestured towards the bee onesie. “And the… what did you call it? _Kega_ …?”

“ _Kigurumi_ ,” said Sherlock patiently. “It refers to Japanese performers who wear animal-based costumes, although the term now encompasses the costumes themselves. The term comes from _kiru_ , ‘to wear’, and _nuigurumi_ , meaning ‘stuffed toy’. And yes, John, quite instructive.”

“Good,” said John, who then turned to Greg. “Thanks for the photos. Sorry I can’t ask you to stay for tea. We have to follow up on the _kigurumi_ thing, and have words with that twat in Redding about wasting our time. Our best to Molly, yeah?”

And the next thing Greg knew, he was in the hall with the door closed firmly at his back.

Within the living room of 221b, John and Sherlock heard Greg departing down the staircase. When the faint click of the front door proved that he had left them, John grinned at Sherlock, deeply proud of their skills of tandem bullshitting. He stood on his tiptoes and kissed the end of his honeybee’s nose.

“Cute as a fucking _pin_ ,” he declared.

Sherlock took a settling breath. He looked down at the stupid slippers. He stood tall in the even more stupid bee onesie. He adjusted the hood over his hair and twisted around to see if his wings were straight.

“Surprisingly comfortable,” he said as he straightened around again, “And warm.”

“Lazy day today?” asked John hopefully.

“The laziest,” Sherlock concurred.

Half an hour later they were on the sofa, Sherlock in his bee suit and slippers, reading a apiarist’s journal. Snugged between his legs was John, leaning back against Sherlock’s chest and reading through a spy thriller that Sherlock had filled with sarcastic margin notes.

“Just so you know,” said John as he turned a page, “I know that you read every page of this thing and I can tell when you were enjoying it.”

“It’s loathsome,” said Sherlock, not looking up from the article on neonicotinoid pesticides.

“Is that why you forgot to vandalise five pages in a row in chapter four?”

“My brain seized up.”

“Of course it did, you adorable numpty.”

Sherlock kissed the back of John’s head. “We should get you one of these _kigurumi_. A bear.”

John tilted his head back to look quizzically at Sherlock. “A bear? You calling me grumpy?”

Sherlock gazed at John and thought of that morning in Manchester, when John had looked so like a puzzled teddy bear. “Rowrr,” growled Sherlock affectionately, and rubbed his forefinger down the furrows of John’s brow to smooth them.

John mock-nipped at Sherlock’s fingers, then snuggled down to read his book again.

“It is a bit rubbish,” he conceded, turning another page. He took up a pen and began to add replies to Sherlock’s snarkiest margin notes.

Sherlock rubbed his cheek against John’s hair again and read about bees.

And thus they spent a cold autumn unbirthday in warm and cosy lassitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This is Sherlock's onesie](http://www.amazon.com/Rnmomo-Unisex-adult-Kigurumi-Bee-Pajamas/dp/B00CYK2V9W/)

**Author's Note:**

> The OMg shirt  
> 
> 
>  
> 
> [The steath fleshlight.](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fleshlight-Stealth-Vortex-199900165-Masturbator/dp/B002SQJIWU)
> 
>  
> 
> [The anatomically correct chocolate heart](http://www.muellerschocolate.com/store/p112/Chocolate_Heart.html)
> 
>  
> 
> And for those who like canon-era Johnlock romance, [ here's my book](https://narrellemharris.wordpress.com/my-books/the-adventure-of-the-colonial-boy/). So many thanks to everyone who's already read it!


End file.
